Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Danish Fleet & Magnets!

Before the start of last weekend, my Dystopian Wars Kingdom of Denmark Naval Battle Group arrived. Over the past roughly two weeks, I cleaned up the miniatures, primed the small ships and aircraft, and made most of the turrets attach via magnets.

This was my first experience using magnets and thus I messed up on a ship, causing its turret to be "fixed-forward." This is likely how most people model their ships. Magnets allows the turrets to rotate through their full-fire arcs. Lastly, for ships which are largely static, it adds to the model allowing it to better show what the ship is doing (should the player choose).

Turrets w/ magnet pairs attached

The magnets are tiny, 2 mm diameter x 1 mm depth. For most the ships, this was the perfect size to wedge into the turret holes. I measured before hand. I started off trying to glue the magnets in. This had the unpleasant result of the magnet pair getting stuck in side and filling the hole.

After some trial and error, I finally settled on what you see at right.

Choose an end of magnets to glue to turrets

Separate two magnets from that end, mark the revealed end

Glue unmarked end of a pair of magnets to a turret

Allow glue to dry

Insert magnets into turret hole, press down

My Ragnarok Pocket Battleship as the turrets are added.

If the magnet does not wedge into the ship

Separate the two magnets

Insert the free magnet marked-side-down into the hole

If marked-side is visible, flip ship to let magnet fall out repeat 2

Once the marked-side is not visible, press firmly to wedge in

Flip ship to make sure the magnet does not fall out, repeat from 2 if it falls out.

Lastly, add the turret and flip the ship upside-down to see if the turrets fall off.

1 of 2 Fafnir Class Light Sky Fortresses, turrets not falling off!

I know that does not fully explain what I did, but it is the basic process I settled upon to not become hugely frustrated with the process.